Is there a video quality advantage in moving from 7950GT KO card to 8600GTS when using WINXPMCE2005? I have read that there is some better quality with the 8600 card but I don't really understand what the practical benefit is. When I install my 8600GTS, it will not handle King Kong HDDVD which causes PowerDVD crashes but the other 22 movies I own work fine; this does not happen with the 7950GT card. Would SLI be a solution to use 8600GTS technology and get enough performance to handle demanding movies like KK?

The 8600 is better because:
1. It uses less power.
2. There have been some improvements in the Purevideo firmware to for both scaling and de-interlacing support.
3. The 8600 will completly decode H264 with its Purevideo HD feature which was designed specifically for decoding HD/BR DVDs instead of providing only partial decoding support as in the 7950GT.

Have you checked for any recent patch updates to your PowerDVD Ultra 7.3 release?

Is there a video quality advantage in moving from 7950GT KO card to 8600GTS when using WINXPMCE2005?

In video quality for film HDDVD/Bluray only, no. Deinterlacing improvements only affect video content, and scaling improvements only help with SD.

All the points in the post above are valid though, so if any of them apply to you then there's a reason to upgrade.

Thanks for the responses!

I am using the 7.3.2911 version of PDVD; i've tried the most recent .3104a version and it does not solve the problem. Using the 8600gts, I must enable hardware acceleration and I cannot play HDDVDs using "Best" quality setting in PDVD or the card downrezzes the video to a small portion of the screen (maybe 256x512); if I set PDVD to "normal" video quality, then HDDVDs (VC-1 and AVC) will fill the 1080p screen except for King Kong which crashes PDVD as soon as the feature EVO tries to launch. The 7950GTKO plays everything just fine at "Best" quality setting in PDVD and only runs at 50-70%CPU without any hardware acceleration; about half that with HA enabled. What is strange is that I have never read anywhere about anyone having to cut back on video quality settings to make the 8600 card play well. I have AMD FX62 dual core (2.8GHz) CPU, 2G Ram so I don't think it is PC horsepower issue.

What about a pair of 8600GTS in SLI?

I don't believe that the Nvidia PureVideo fully supports VC1 decoding for HD-DVDs so that may be where your problem is coming in. Have you tried upgrading to the 163.71 WHQL drivers (http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_163.71.html)? SLI is not going to help you for this issue, it would only improve performance for 3D rendering applications, which this isn't.

If your 7950GT is already running them fine why do you want a 8600GTS?

Avatar, thanks! And I grew up in the Nashville area and graduated from VU a long time ago.

I have not tried the WHQL version of 163.71; I did try one of the beta releases of FW163 but they didn't seem to solve the issue I am having. But, since the driver is now WHQL, I can give it a try. I was pretty sure that SLI wouldn't help but thanks for confirming.

I do have another Q. Currently, I use TheaterTek 2.4 for SD DVD player and of course PDVD for HD DVDs. When I run DECCHECK, it shows that I have the Purevideo 196 decoder selected as "preferred". Does it matter any longer what decoder is selected as preferred with newer HD Purevideo cards? Should I select the Cyberlink HD/BD decoder or does PDVD use the Cyberlink decoder by default?

Sunkist, the literature seems to indicate that the 8600 card has better video processing or post processing which is supposed to produce better quality video if I understand the words. So, since my projector displays 1080p, I am just trying to make sure that I send the best quality signal to the video processor that feeds the projector.

I have not heard of any picture quality improvements over older cards but I would say check for some reviews when the 8600s originally came out and you might find some comparisons.

Here is one of the sources I used for my comment on general video quality. I have not saved the links for the others that I read last spring.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8600_8500_faq.html

Avatar, thanks! And I grew up in the Nashville area and graduated from VU a long time ago.

Awesome, I'm willing to bet you would be surprised how much the city has grown if it's been a decade or two since you've been here. Were you here when they closed down Opryland and made it a shopping mall for instance? Or can you believe they're putting a 1057' tall residental tower in downtown. Groundbreaking for it should be any time now if they haven't already.


I have not tried the WHQL version of 163.71; I did try one of the beta releases of FW163 but they didn't seem to solve the issue I am having. But, since the driver is now WHQL, I can give it a try. I was pretty sure that SLI wouldn't help but thanks for confirming.

I do have another Q. Currently, I use TheaterTek 2.4 for SD DVD player and of course PDVD for HD DVDs. When I run DECCHECK, it shows that I have the Purevideo 196 decoder selected as "preferred". Does it matter any longer what decoder is selected as preferred with newer HD Purevideo cards? Should I select the Cyberlink HD/BD decoder or does PDVD use the Cyberlink decoder by default?

Just curious why you run two different DVD players? I usually bounce between my PC, my Xbox360 and my DVD player for DVD playback. Don't have an HDDVD player at the moment so that isn't a concern. Anyways, as far as the preferred decoder, using the Purevideo decoder allows the Video card to handle as much of the processing as it can. I'm not certain how much HW acceleration the Cyberlink decoder will provide. I believe, based on my usage of PDVD7, that if you enable the effects like the Eagle Eye and such that it uses all or mostly SW decoding but if you turn those off and use the HW overlay then it lets the Video Card handle more of the processing. It really comes down to what the decoder uses to make the calls, though. I use Vista now and PureVideo doesn't work there but I know the MS decoder used in Media Center and WMP11 does take advantage of the hardware accleration using standard driver calls.

However, if you can change your default decoder to something besides PureVideo and can get it to run in software it may help you determine where the problem lies. If it works in purely software mode then it may be a problem with the video card or drivers.

Sunkist, the literature seems to indicate that the 8600 card has better video processing or post processing which is supposed to produce better quality video if I understand the words. So, since my projector displays 1080p, I am just trying to make sure that I send the best quality signal to the video processor that feeds the projector.

I not certain that the PureVideo does a whole lot for quality enhancement through post processing so much as it offloads the decoding from the CPU but I really haven't looked into it much since the PureVideo decoder doesn't work in Vista though so I may well be wrong on that. I don't know about HD, but for SD have you considered using something like FFDShow to do your decoding, enhancement, and scaling? I'm not certain how it compares to doing it with the PureVideo hardware but it gives you more options and might do better. I know I saw a guide to it on I think it was htpcnews.com (which appears to be down at the moment) a few years ago and it seemed to make a marked difference in quality judging by the screenies they gave. I was able to find this from the Google cache, however.
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:5zUKKgLjnr4J:www.htpcnews.com/forums/index.php%3Fshowtopic%3D17427+htpc+guide+ffdshow&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&lr=lang_en
You can see how much sharper the FFDshow images (top) are compared to the purevideo images (bottom). Dunno how much improvement Nvidia has made to Purevideo since then, though.

I have not heard of any picture quality improvements over older cards but I would say check for some reviews when the 8600s originally came out and you might find some comparisons.

According to this chart (http://www.nvidia.com/docs/CP/11036/PureVideo_Product_Comparison.pdf) from Nvidia, the PureVideo on the 8500/8600 GPUs only adds

VC-1/WMV decode accleration with IDCT for SD and HD content
H.264 Decode Acceleration with IDCT and CAVLC/CABAC for SD and HD content.


Oh yeah, I would also suggest using a program like Driver Cleaner .NET to remove all the bits of your old drivers. It's something like $10 but does a GREAT job getting rid of the bits and pieces of files and drivers that get left behind by the normal uninstall. Just uninstall the driver, boot to safe mode (preferable but not required but be sure to cancel out of any new hardware wizards before it installs drivers), run the driver cleaner app and if you want also the cab cleaner. Either way will probably require another reboot. Again cancel any new HW wizards and then install the latest WHQL drivers and see if that helps. I've had this program resolve a number of strange driver issues in the past and highly recommend it. I use it more often than not anytime I upgrade drivers to help prevent issues.

Here is one of the sources I used for my comment on general video quality. I have not saved the links for the others that I read last spring.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8600_8500_faq.html

That sounds like marketing mumbo jumbo to me but I looked at some old reviews and only one mentioned image quality being better than ATI cards but nothing about improvements made over the previous generation.

I have not had good luck with the 8600GTS and the latest drivers. The latest driver reduces cpu usage but gives me a black screen.

Avatar, thanks for the very thorough response. And, it's been almost 4 decades since I graduated and moved away...yeah, sympathy is in order as I am now a senior citizen. Nashville is very different from when I grew up there; it's turned into a big city. I still get back there occasionally as my wife's Mom still lives there.

As far as the multiple players, I replaced my components a few years back and replaced with a HTPC. When SD DVD was just about all that was available, I finally settled on the TheaterTek software and it has done a good job. Recently, I rebuilt my HTPC upgrading the mobo, memory, cpu, etc so that I would have enough horsepower to play HD DVDs which led me to PowerDVD as the player for them. I currently use the MS HD DVD player connected via USB to my HTPC for ripping HD DVDs to my hard drives and play them with PDVD to send them to my 1080p front projector. I have one of the new LG combo drives on order (maybe I should say backorder) to displace the external drive and also to get me a reasonably affordable BluRay drive also.

I upgraded to the latest triple dot release from PDVD today and it seems to work OK. I tried the new 163.71 WHQL drivers but they did not work well--looked like an inkjet printer output when one of the ink colors runs dry--streaked and off color. So, I am back to 162.18 drivers which seem to work OK with the 7950 card I have installed now. Until I can get a config that works OK with the 7950 card, I don't plan to re-install the 8600 card as it seems to be only marginally capable. With my current config, CPU runs about 30-35% with HA and a complex HDDVD like KK.

htpcnews.com is out of business as far as I can tell; I was a fan for years but I think the owner lost interest and finally the support folk gave up. missingremote.com and the AVS Fora seem to be taking up the slack quite nicely though.

I've thought about going the ffdshow route several times but just never wanted that many knobs to turn but I may need to rethink it.

After watching a few HD DVDs, I really hate to watch a SD DVD even though I can scale it to 1080p, since you simply cannot compare the quality of the two. So, now my collection is about 15% HDDVD and I don't buy any SD DVDs anymore; my wife still seems happy to buy her girl movies in SD, so our collection still grows and this is one reason I have been interested in the improvements that the 8600 card is supposed to deliver if I could get it to work.

I will try the driver cleaner as that is something I haven't done yet and since Mr. Bill didn't build that into his OSs, I am sure that I could benefit from it.

Thanks again to all for the helpful suggestions!

I believe the issue is that you are using XP MCE2005.

The selling point of the 8600 is that the processing of several codecs is offloaded from the CPU to the GPU. but unless there has been a recent driver update, that feature is only available in Vista.

Has that changed?

If that's the case, the 7950 has more horsepower and is why you are having better results with it. Change to Vista and you will see the benefits of the 8600.

Yeah, the latest Vista driver does provide for improved post processing that I don't think I can get in XP; I am not sure if it deloads the CPU any more than the latest XP driver. I use a Linksys MCE Extender that will not work with Vista, so I am deferring the conversion to Vista until I have extender options besides the XBOX 360. But, you're probably right that I may not be satisfied until I ditch XP for Vista.

Yes, the PureVideo is also supported in XP now according to Nvidia.

Dan, I know that there is a lot to mess with in FFDShow but keep in mind that it should mostly be just a one time thing. Once you have gone through the labor of setting it up and getting it working to your satisfaction once, you should not have to go down that road again, at least not until you reinstall Windows. :) I don't think it is really all THAT much work to set up either. Probably more than Joe Sixpack might be willing to do, but if you were him you wouldn't be using an HTPC in the first place, you would just have an upsampling DVD player.